Dimagi-Supported Project Announced As Part of 2020 Audacious Project

A joint effort led by ACEGID and the Broad Institute, supported by Fathom and MASS Design

Today, TED announced that a joint effort between the Broad Institute of MIT and Harvard, the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases, Dimagi, Fathom Information Design, and MASS Design will be a part of this year’s Audacious Project – a collaborative funding initiative targeting big, bold solutions to the world’s most urgent challenges. Every year, the Audacious Project brings together some of the most trusted names in philanthropy to select ideas with the potential to create global change.

This joint effort is a result of a bold plan to get ahead of pandemic outbreaks by building and deploying Sentinel, a pandemic preemption system that will not only detect viral threats in real time but help stop them before they spread. 

Sentinel will use a three-part approach to detect viruses, connect data systems, and empower the healthcare community, allowing us to respond to emerging viral threats in real time wherever they arise. Using simple point-of-care tests and others that can simultaneously look for hundreds of different viruses, healthcare workers will be able to identify high priority viruses within an hour, any known human virus within a day, and previously unknown viruses within a week. Using our mobile applications and advanced dashboards, this information will be shared across the public health community in real time.

In the coming years, we envision Sentinel will become an integral element of healthcare systems everywhere. Sentinel was proposed before COVID-19 and was designed to help detect threats like COVID-19 and respond before they turn into global pandemics. The project will focus its initial efforts on mitigating COVID-19 and helping recover from it, while also laying the groundwork for addressing and avoiding future threats as well. 

The Sentinel Program will allow Dimagi to further expand its support for COVID-19 response, while also enabling governments and organizations around the world to build a foundation for future viral threats. Dimagi will be leading the work on providing digital solutions to healthcare providers and connectivity to labs through its leading open-source platform, CommCare.  The Sentinel Program will also support Dimagi’s investment in a new middleware platform to enable any rapid diagnostic test to easily integrate with CommCare and other common digital platforms.  

“We’re proud to work alongside our partners, at the Broad Institute, the African Center of Excellence for Genomics of Infectious Diseases, Fathom, and MASS Design, and are thankful to the Audacious Project for supporting our team in offering a solution that can help respond now to COVID-19 and could prevent the next pandemic,” said Dimagi Co-Founder and CEO Jonathan Jackson. 

Dimagi has already been heavily involved in COVID-19 response, working with partners such as the San Francisco Department of Public Health as well as Sierra Leone’s Directorate of Science, Technology, and Innovation. To support rapid deployment, Dimagi has also released a suite of open source applications for COVID-19 response, including applications for contact tracing, community-based surveillance, facility readiness, and supply chain tracking. 

Additionally, Dimagi and the Foundation for Innovative New Diagnostics (FIND) are working together on digital solutions for strengthening diagnosis in LMICs. 

To view the complete announcement from TED, click here. 

For more information on Dimagi’s efforts to fight the spread of COVID-19, click here.

About Dimagi 

Founded in 2002, Dimagi Inc. is an award-winning, socially conscious technology company that helps organizations deliver quality digital solutions for a variety of sectors, across urban and rural communities around the world. Dimagi’s flagship technology product, CommCare,  is an award-winning, open-source mobile data collection and service delivery platform designed to improve data collection and the quality of frontline services in low-resource settings. Dimagi’s team of exceptional physicians, engineers, and health system architects have performed technical strategy, systems design, software development, and health research for over 2,000 projects in over 80 countries, with partners that include the World Health Organization, World Bank, USAID, CDC, World Vision, UNICEF, PATH, the Rockefeller Foundation, and the Bill & Melinda Gates Foundation.